WWWD? What Would Walt Do? The Disney/Marvel Deal.

If you really, really care about all things Disney, then the announcement that Disney is going to acquire Marvel Comics for $4 billion is cause for concern.

Disney is more than a company; it's a 70-plus year old belief system that every kid worldwide seems to adopt at an early age. For some people, the fairy dust dissipates at puberty; for others, it is as ingrained in their personal psyches as much at age 50 as at age 5.

How that feeling can linger much longer, I don't know. Buying up Marvel can't help. We've seen the original Disney characters pushed aside in the past at Disneyland (Toontown, or California Adventure, for example) but I can't bear to see the X Men take over Tomorrowland, or see Spiderman swinging down Main Street USA. I'm sure thousands of people would, but not me. I'm sure it's just not what Walt would have wanted.

Uncle Walt's been dead now (can you believe it?) 43 years, and the stewardship of the Magic Kingdom has strayed from Walt Disney's visage considerably during that time. I like to blame Michael Eisner, the long-time head of the company, but Eisner's been gone now for several years, so who's to say?

Perhaps it's the people that Eisner hired, and still work there; perhaps it's the people who concern themselves with watching the money and the stock price, rather than pretending they work alongside the seven dwarfs or Cinderella.

No matter. I personally now see Disney as just another entertainment empire. Perhaps it was always so, but I think Walt truly wanted us to believe that there was a safe, interesting world of history, science, and nature, and a bright future for all. Bringing Marvel into the Disney fold adds nothing to that vision.

Tom Dowd and the Language of Music

Last night I watched an absolutely fascinating documentary on Tom Dowd. I'd never heard of him before, yet he did so much in his lifetime that I'm familiar with. It's one of those stories that, if somebody made it up, one would say "that's preposterous -- nobody did that" and yet Tom Dowd really did.

Imagine a 16 year old Physics whiz, studying at Columbia University. It's 1941. At night, he haunts the jazz clubs, meeting legendary acts that we still revere today. Through a twist of fate, he ends up engineering recordings. This is back in the day of direct-to-acetate discs, mind you.

Soon, he's drafted into the Army, where he's sent right back to Columbia to work on something called the "Manhattan Project". Yeah, that Manhattan project -- the kid is helping design the first atomic bomb.

His night job is getting him lots of attention, though, in the music world. The war ends, and he's sent off to Bikini Island to study A-bomb tests. Mind you, he still hasn't completed school!

After the tests, he returns to Columbia to find they want him to study 1939-era Physics, when the Physics world has totally been changed by the advent of the Bomb -- which he helped create. Dowd drops out to concentrate on his music career.

And what a career. Dowd engineered recordings for the likes of John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, Cream, Lynyrd Skinner, the Allman Brothers, and many many more.

Oh, and while he's doing all this, he pretty much invents the use of multiple track recording techniques and the equipment to make it possible. Just freakin' amazing.

Toward the end of the show, Dowd sits at a console and demonstrates just how he mixed "Layla" for Eric Clapton's Derek and the Dominoes. I was totally blown away.

If you're the least bit interested in music, history, or even Physics (!) you've got to see this film.

Practice Your Portuguese While Peeing In The Shower. Really.

Looks as though I'm on the cutting edge of something...

First I open my Redlands Daily Facts tonight, and I find a lengthy column on the benefits of taking a leak in the shower. Apparently, you can not only save a gallon of water, but it's good for what ails your feet.

Not an hour later, I run across this You tube video from Portugal. It's a for-real public service announcement, and it's pretty damn funny for a PSA. I hope you enjoy it.

It Slices, It Dices -- the New "Bushomatic".

You've got to try this! I won't spoil the surprise by describing the "Bushomatic" but it can be a hell of a lot of fun. I thank movie critic and all-round great guy Roger Ebert for the link. Just click the headline of this entry, or enter the following:

http://www.idyacy.com/cgi-bin/bushomatic.cgi

Justice Scalia and the Letter of the Law.

Common sense is the basis for common law. Common sense, however, seems to get lost in today's legal system. Here's a prime example this week from Justice Scalia:

"(The Supreme Court) has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a court that he is 'actually' innocent."

In other words, if a man sitting on death row, about to be executed, is somehow found to be innocent, but has received a fair trial finding him guilty, there's nothing a federal court, even the Supreme Court, can do to intervene.

Why? It's because the Supreme Court hasn't ever ruled on the topic. So... sorry dude -- you're gonna fry or get gassed or injected because of the arcane nature of our legal system. The best the Supreme Court can do right now is send flowers to the funeral.

Maybe it's true, but it sure is freaking scary, isn't it? Common sense would lead you to believe that the highest court in the land could stop an innocent man from being executed. But --- nooooo!